


Lunch

by maiaronan



Category: Jurassic World (2015)
Genre: F/M, Tumblr: forsurvivals
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-26
Updated: 2015-07-26
Packaged: 2018-04-11 07:43:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,184
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4427066
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maiaronan/pseuds/maiaronan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Owen realizes he's never heard Claire laugh before. Things change after the two go on an impromptu lunch break.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lunch

Claire Dearing never laughs, he noticed. 

Well, it was to be expected, with her uptight demeanor and unnecessarily pointy high heels and serious grey eyes. (Grey? Green? Blue? Owen had spent multitudes of hours staring at those eyes during board meetings where she prattled off numbers and figures which bored, yet fascinated him, to no end, trying to decide exactly what color they were. He eventually settled for grey after noticing how they looked like two silver moons under a cloudless sky.)

Sometimes she smiles, a sardonic one most of the time. Her humor is drier than his favorite martini, and rarer than instances where his raptors actually behaved for him. But sometimes, _sometimes_ , Owen could see a glimmer of a genuine smile hidden between the twitching of her mouth. She was like a gem encased in a solid shell of blistering cold ice, just waiting for someone to chip away at.

The first three weeks of getting to know Claire could simply be described as a living hell, filled with heated, awkward, infuriating exchanges as Miss Park Manager shot him her steely glare and spoke to him with her articulated voice that straddled the line between preachy and angelic, and Owen did all he could to make absolutely everything he did was something that pissed her off (because she was authority! Stick it to the (wo)man, right?). The power struggle that shotgunned back and forth between the two was nothing less of a nightmare, as Claire (“I’m in charge, Mr. Grady, and you would be doing everyone a _very_ big favor if you could stick to the itinerary”) and Owen (“My paper shredder couldn’t tell the difference between my Cosco receipt and your itinerary”) attempted to size each other up, push the other one down as they eventually found a somewhat-functioning balance (a very _tense_ balance, but still, a balance). 

After Claire finally agreed to cut Owen some slack about itineraries and raptor training, she disappeared out of his life for a little while. Owen found it significantly harder to be a smartmouth every time they passed each other in the hall. With the little precious seconds he had, he wanted to say so much more than just a snarky comment. He wanted to update her on how fast the raptors were growing up. He wanted to talk to her about how great the new petting zoo attraction was. He wanted to complain to her about the new interns in the control room. He wanted so much more than he had in that moment.

So he stopped her. 

Claire liked to beeline through hallways with an intense, glassy expression in her eyes, her mind probably focused on whatever work lay ahead in the day. But she stopped for him, snapping out of her hazy stupor and blinking up at him. She was so tiny compared to him. So pale and soft and well-groomed, with her ridiculous haircut and equally red lipstick. 

Owen coughed. “Lunch.” His own voice echoed along the glass-paned hallways of the Jurassic World corporate building.

Claire tilted her head ever so slightly, the long ends of her red hair trailing along her white blazer. She gave him that quizzical expression that ever-so-often visited her porcelain face. “Lunch?” she repeated, shuffling the papers and folders in between her arms. 

“Let’s have lunch,” Owen attempted to clarify, feeling a slight heat creeping into his face. “Together. Today. Uh, I…” He coughed, clearing his throat loudly. “Just have some things, some updates, about the raptors, that I should keep you up to date on.”

Claire’s grey eyes glimmered with fascination for a brief moment. “I…” She began, her gaze drifting away as she contemplated his offer. She pursed her lips.

Owen convinced himself that it would be _fine_ if she decided to reject his offer, that he’d just brush it off and continue their lives as normal, as meticulously planned. 

The first time Claire completely surprised him was approximately a month after they first met, when she had somehow decided to agree to have lunch with him. Claire Dearing and Owen Grady. 

“Where would you like to go?” Claire asked him, her usually-sharp voice taking on a soft, husky edge that sent a brief tremor down Owen’s spine. She reached into the front pocket of her purse to fish out her phone. “There’s a nice Japanese restaurant about 25 minutes out, we could catch a ferry—“

Without thinking, Owen reached out and lowered her phone with his hand. He felt his fingers brush the softness of her wrist. 

“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “I have to go back to work soon. Let’s just grab something to eat here.”

Claire Dearing furrowed her brow. “Here? At the park?” she inquired. She raised an eyebrow. “Mr. Grady, I don’t think it’s all that… _appropriate_ for the park manager to be…” She hesitated, pushing a stray lock out of her eyes. 

“At the park?” Owen finished, a grin spreading across his face. “It’s not all that appropriate for the park manager to be at the park?” 

Claire opened her mouth to retaliate, but Owen spoke before she could, “Come on. It’ll be something quick, easy, greasy, completely unhealthy…” He raised his eyebrow to match hers. “You have cheat days in your ridiculous diet, don’t you?”

Claire glared at him. “I will have you know, Mr. Grady—“

“— _Owen_.”

Claire huffed. “Owen,” she corrected herself. She bit her lip. Owen noticed she did that a lot when she was thinking. Whatever she had planned to lay on him a few moments before, she’d clearly changed her mind about. “Well then, let’s go to the park.” She offered him her most corporate smile as they strolled out the glass doors of the office building.

Isla Nublar always sported blazing sunny days and temperatures hot enough to fry an egg on the sidewalk. Owen had more or less gotten used to it by then—after all, he spent a good chunk of his time outside with the raptors in their steamy tropical habitat. But Owen could definitely tell that Claire was suffering under the sweltering heat. Her hair stuck to the sides of her sweaty face, and she fidgeted uncomfortably in her thick office clothes, but she remained silent. Owen figured that she wasn’t the kind of woman to complain about things like being inappropriately dressed for the weather. Brushing the hair off of her face, Claire trekked after Owen in the blinding noon sunlight, down the tremendous amount of stairs that led them from the office building perched on top of a rocky hill to the attractions and main park down below. Her heels clacked with every step. Owen managed to stop himself from asking how she could deal with that noise every second of the day. 

Soon enough, they’d passed under the monorail rattling past above them and blended into a crowd of eager tourists, speaking rapidly in an Eastern European language as they pointed to various attractions on the map in front of them. Owen and Claire glanced at each other. He could see the faintest of smiles appearing on her face. 

They wandered off, in mostly a comfortable silence, into the massive crowds of people roaming the island, their faces buried in maps and the bodies smelling faintly of sunscreen and sweat. They paid no attention to them as they made their way to a nearby hotdog stand, passing through Jurassic World as if they were simply guests at the park instead of the manager and local raptor trainer.

The worker at the hotdog stand didn’t even recognize them (which Owen hadn’t expected to). He insisted on buying Claire an overpriced hotdog (seriously, a 5 dollar, soggy hotdog was cruel and unethical) and held her phone as she loaded it with condiments. 

They sat down at a nearby bench in the shade of a tall umbrella, across from the petting zoo, munching on their meals and keeping a wary eye out for any casualties in the Ride-A-Triceratops attraction. 

They chatted, amicably, about raptor training, sales, their coworkers… anything they could to keep the conversation going. When it inevitably lulled, Owen took the opportunity to scrunch his napkin into a ball and shoot it into the trashcan across the walkway, almost hitting a lady’s sunhat on its way. 

“Do you always have to do that?” Claire sounded annoyed as she folded up her napkin for proper disposal. 

“Do what?” Owen grinned. 

“ _Be_ like that,” Claire retorted. “It would take three seconds to walk across the path and throw away your napkin instead of chucking it.”

“Aw, Claire, now that’s not any fun, is it?” Owen said, kicking his feet back and settling into the bench. He glanced at her. She was rolling her eyes at the sound of the word “fun”. “Now come on, when’s the last time you had fun?” he asked. “ _Really_ had fun.”

Claire was back to raising eyebrows and tapping her perfectly-manicured nails on the bench. “Are you implying that I do not have fun on a regular basis, _Mr. Grady_?”

“Maybe,” Owen replied, leaning closer to her. She looked so great in this lighting. He’d never seen her outside of the dim, fluorescent bulbs that filled the interior of the corporate buildings. He could see every strand of her thick eyelashes, every freckle that peppered her face. “I’m implying that you’ve never had fun. You probably weren’t even fun as a kid. Jurassic World would’ve been a waste on you.”

She looked positively offended. Owen laughed. He couldn’t help it. 

“I’ll have you know that I was _very_ fun as a kid,” Claire sniffed, turning her head in that haughty manner she always liked to do in front of him. “In fact, I was the wild one before my sister decided to take over that role.”

“Were you?” Owen was entirely intrigued. “Claire Dearing, the wild one? No way. What was the craziest thing you’ve ever done?” 

Claire cupped her chin with her hands and propped herself up to look at Owen. She batted her ridiculous eyelashes at him. “I eloped with this guy when I was in college.”

Owen stared at her. “You’re married?” He tried to imagine prim and proper Claire in any sort of a relationship with another human being and a gaggle of redheaded children running around her in circles. His brain almost deteriorated. 

“No, clearly not,” Claire lamented. “We never went through with it. I guess I… chickened out last minute.” She smiled. “We went all the way to Vegas. I decided to turn the car around and go all the way back to Wisconsin. We obviously never spoke again.” 

Owen blinked as she raised her head just the slightest to catch his breath with her incredible eyes. They were gorgeously green under the Central American sun. “What about you, Owen?” Her voice had returned to that soft, feathery consistency that made Owen’s mind wander. “I’m certain you have some… questionable stories from your long and adventurous life.”

Owen furrowed his brow. “Well… I was drunk…”

“Of course,” Claire deadpanned. 

Owen almost laughed. He stifled a chuckle and stared at her with playful eyes. “I got drunk and proceeded to pour two liters of bubble bath into a fountain in the middle of the city. Came back an hour later to see the fountain was overflowing with bubbles.” He scratched his head. “Proceeded to take my clothes off and skinny dip in said fountain.”

Claire laughed.

Owen needed a moment to process it.

Claire, a slender woman whose movements were contained to the stiff folding of legs and her quick fingers on her smartphone, threw back her head and laughed, her shoulders shaking. 

For some reason Owen had imagined Claire with a delicate, tinkling laugh to match her delicate demeanor. Okay, maybe delicate wasn’t the proper word, but he swears within the three weeks of meeting her she’s never seen the sunlight that wasn’t through her office window. 

But here she was, with a laugh that resounded through the little pavilion they were sitting in, a laugh that threw her back against the bench and filled his ears with a sound that he could only understand as pure joy. He wanted to bottle it and have it as a keepsake. The one time he’d heard Claire Dearing laugh. His instincts told him it was a sound he wouldn’t hear again for a while. 

Eventually, they cleaned the ketchup off their mouths and returned to work. He passed her later that day in the same hallway. She shifted her eyes from her phone to him, and gave him a little nod. The usual. She looked back down at her phone and started to walk away.

“Hey,” Owen said, louder than he wanted it to sound. Claire looked up at him again, somewhat startled. She tilted her head inquisitively. 

Owen grinned. “Bubble fountain.”

Claire looked confused for a split second, and then her face melted into amusement. Owen could feel his grin stretching his face as he watched her try to smother her laughter behind her hands. 

 

**Author's Note:**

> I borrowed the bubble fountain story from a chap on Reddit. Bless him, I hope he continues to take bubble baths in public fountains.


End file.
